About Me

I'm just me - a solitary wanderer who trekked across much of the world and recently retired to a small farm in the Ozarks.
My checkered past includes time spent as an Army officer, high school teacher and principal, real estate broker, child protection worker and administrator, and social worker with the U.S. military.
Over the years I have resided in a variety of places including Missouri, Virginia, Okinawa, Kansas, Kentucky, and Arizona. I have also traveled to Germany, Mexico, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Belize, Guatemala, Taiwan, Guam, South Korea, Vietnam, and numerous islands in the Caribbean - including Cuba.
I have ridden in a Russian ambulance, hitch-hiked across Moscow late at night, fought an ostrich, celebrated New Year's at a street party in Hanoi, and bicycled across the Caribbean. My travels have taken me to Ground Zero in Hiroshima, the Bolshoi Ballet, China Beach, and the White House kitchen.
The nine things in life that I am most proud of are my children: Nick, Molly, and Tim, and my grandchildren: Boone, Sebastian, Judah, Olive, Willow, and Sullivan.
Life has been very good to me indeed!

Thursday, July 6, 2017

With Apologies to Real Pigs Everywhere

by Pa RockCitizen Journalist

It
occurs to me that the Republican Party might want to rethink its
mascot. While the enormous mammal, the elephant, has served the party
well for over a century, and it was perhaps truly representative of the
obese titans of business and industry who did much to foster the growth
and success of the party during America's first gilded age, the elephant
is a bit too docile and endearing to reflect the values of the
individuals who run today's Republican Party.

This past
holiday weekend, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, displayed
modern Republican values to the rest of the world by behaving like a
royal potentate - and then lying about it. Governor Christie had
closed all of New Jersey's state beaches as retaliation in a budget
conflict that he was having with the state legislature, but then, in a
dazzling display of arrogance and hubris, he flew off to one of those
closed beaches where he and his family - and their friends - spent a
nice weekend in the sun and surf. To add insult to injury, Christie
flew there in a state-owned helicopter, thus avoiding traffic which he
had been known to help intentionally snarl - for political payback - in
the past.

The world was his oyster, and Chris Christie was a shining pearl.

When
reporters asked the governor if he had gotten any sun over the holiday
weekend, he went with his big gut instinct and lied, a fabrication which
was soon ripped apart when some aerial photos of the governor and his
spawn sprawled out on the largely vacant Atlantic beach made it into the
press. The poor beleaguered governor apparently had no drones at his
disposal to keep the air space over his beach safe from intruders.

It was so unfair.

Governor
Christie, who like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, also a
Republican, has undergone weight-loss surgery, is still a man of
considerable girth - as measured by anyone's axe handle. And, to be
completely fair, he was not the only rotund politician wallowing in
highly exclusive privilege in New Jersey last weekend. Donald Trump and
his entourage were holed up at Trump's private golf club in Bedminster,
NJ, a trip funded at taxpayer expense and which also generated a tidy
profit Donald Trump and his family. Thanks, suckers!

The
elephant is obviously too sweet and lovable to represent these modern
Republicans, and even though a beached whale would come closer to the
mark, especially representative of Chris Christie, it too lacks the
greed and avarice that are so characteristic of today's GOP. Perhaps
the pig would be more suited to the task of symbolizing what the
Republican Party has become - and not just any pig, but some angry
800-pound boar who wants to control and consume everything within its
range of vision.

And it truly has to be a boar, because
a GOP sow's place is in the sty feeding litter after litter of little
piggies - just ask the boars who run the party.

Christie
wallowing on a beach that he was able to empty, Trump playing golf and
eating steak in a rarefied setting where he did not have to interact
with the masses - and it's all paid for by the public. And closer to
home there were GOP congressmen and senators avoiding holiday events so
they didn't have to answer questions about why they are hellbent on
destroying health care in America - those are the modern Republicans
behaving like . . . well . . . pigs.

The appropriate mascot for the modern Republican Party is so obvious that it stinks.